Was asked by a new Ubuntu user - who also wants to learn about programming - what he could use to run BASIC code. He was working through a BASIC book before trying out Ubuntu, and he'd like to continue without having to switch back to Windows.

It looks like there are a few BASIC packages in the standard repositories, as well as projects like Mono which may include some kind of BASIC support.

What would be a good recommendation from the standard repositories - or from a deb package - for someone learning the basics of BASIC and new to Ubuntu?

The recommendations for other languages is really outside of the scope of this site.
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dv3500eaOct 11 '10 at 16:19

I have removed them. Programming questions should be asked on stack overflow. The rest of the question is OK because it is concerning an Ubuntu package.
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dv3500eaOct 11 '10 at 16:24

@dv3500ea I was saying I didn't want other language recommendations. Since it's about a language, I wanted to be clear I didn't want 'he should learn [language] instead' answers. So I'm not sure why you edited that out, then said the same thing in the comments.
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Tim LytleOct 11 '10 at 17:08

I'm sorry, I must have read it incorrectly. I actually thought you meant that you did want recommendations for other languages ... my bad.
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dv3500eaOct 11 '10 at 20:59

I have never tried this but I suppose it would be possible to run something like QBASIC through an emulator like DOSBox. DOSBox is available from the repository but he'd have to get his own copy of QBASIC on it once installed.

If someone has tried this feel free to edit this answer with more details.